It takes something along the order of a newish Apocalyptic Horseman to lure me from the garden this summer right as my monstrous dwarfed curly sunflowers are beginning to bloom.The Endtimes ballooning corporate media zeitgeist infused into one particular morning news morsel, this Tuesday, had me hotfooting it to my recently unloved ‘puter to the sonorous but catchy clop of demonic hooves accompanying haunted memories of various, old Eyewitness News themes.The dizzyingly decadent Imperial celebrity fashion of highly publicized 3rd world adoption enters a new and surely more tasteless phase when, as I read the Washington Postvia this morning’s always informative DCRTV.com, local TV news anchors now try for geographically themed babies with the photogenic verve they once attempted Emmys.According to the Post’s latest attempt at gossip, The Reliable Source:

Tracey Neale is going to briefly disappear from the airwaves, and now we know why: WUSA's nightly anchor is adopting two children from Ethiopia…Neale went public with her plan Sunday night at the Rammys, the annual awards for local chefs and restaurants (check out the winners in tomorrow's Food section).

See what I mean about taste?I mean right out of the starting gate, a local TV news personality takes crass to a level not even imagined by the likes of Madonna, Britany or Angelina!!Announcing the adoption of children from a chronically starvation-prone people at a restaurant award ceremony has an almost AbFab-ian quality to it; the sort of brilliantly acid socially comic counterpoint we expect from Jennifer Saunders and the BBC much less a deadpan major market local TV also ran.As Edina Monsoon used the threat and eventual adoption of Rumanian babies over her long-suffering daughter Saffron in 1993’s prescient 1st season episode Iso Tank, local TV anchors, rock and movie stars must, we all suspect, have some private ulterior motives lurking under those ever so public Pepsodent smiles.As usual, local TV news ends today’s story with a tasteless tease:

Plans for maternity leave are up in the air, and she's still trying to decide if she'll bring a WUSA crew to Ethiopia when she picks up her kids. One thing she knows for sure. As a first-time mom, she's going to need an experienced nanny. "I'm already looking," she said.

Wondering if Tracey’s yet to enroll the Ethiopian babies in a Pilates class or Jack and Jill, I breathe air thick with the too tempting odor of a 5 part Sweeps series and highly questionable motivations.Oxygen-starved thoughts rush back to the straightforward complications of gardening.The innocent purity of new life, be it plant or animal and no matter how burdened, brings with it the God and life-affirming potential to triumph over any adversity.Cornflowers, so beautiful and gentrified in my deck garden, often remind rural Americans of cattle pastures where each summer the tall flowers bloomed from the unsavory remnants of rotting cow dung.In the Ethiopia of the TV anchor’s adoptive children, cow dung is too valuable a commodity to be allowed to rot in a field.

Note--In keeping with the infrequent journalistic practice of full disclosure, I must confess to having worked for the TV station that currently owns Ms Neale’s contract from 1981 through 1997 under entirely different management.